RATS are amazing at avoiding dangers. What is their secret? Could empathy be a contributing factor? Or is this too far-fetched? This is what a group of researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience tried to investigate. Their study, to be published on December 5th in PLoS Biology, shows that rats can use other rats as danger antennas, by being exquisitely sensitive to the emotions of the rats around them. With this finding, new targets for treatment of empathy disorders in humans, such as psychopathy and frontotemporal dementia, will open in the future.
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